Grime and Punishment: A Jane Jeffry Mystery (13 page)

She paused, letting the thought soak in to Shelley's traffic-fuddled brain. She was easing the minivan into a parking place near the main entrance to the shopping center. They didn't talk until they were inside. "Damn! I thought Marshall Fields was at this end. We've got to walk clear down the mall," Shelley said.

They set out briskly, passing an endless number of shoe stores. "Have you ever noticed that nobody's ever actually buying shoes in these places?" Jane mused. Eyes on the shop window they were passing, she collided with a solid bank of elderly men taking their daily health-walk. Shelley stood aside while Jane extricated herself from canes and walkers and apologized. She had no sooner gotten free when, from the other direction, four women outfitted in stylish jogging suits and wearing fanatically determined expressions nearly ran her down.

“When did the mall become a running track?" Jane complained. "What happened to leisurely strolling?”

Shelley made no comment. She'd apparently been brooding over what Jane had been saying in the car. "So you figure whoever killed Ramona meant to kill Edith and mistook her?" she asked, resuming her quick pace. "But Jane, they don't look that much alike.”

Jane tried to answer without panting. "But you vacuum with your back to the doorway.”

No explanation was necessary, Shelley accepted this and went on. "But why? So what if it was supposed to be Edith instead of Ramona? That doesn't get you any closer to knowing who or why. Have you told Detective VanDyne about this idea?”

They'd come to an escalator, and Jane was able to get her breath for a moment. "Oh, I have. I'll tell you how charming he was about vacuuming backwards later. As a matter of fact, the idea had occurred to him as well."

“And did he think it was meant to be Edith?”

“He didn't share his thoughts," Jane replied archly.

Shelley arched an eyebrow, but didn't ask for an elaboration. They reached the other end of the mall, and Jane occupied herself studying all the pretty linens on sale while Shelley managed her towel return. Jane had been witness to some of Shelley's transactions before, and it wasn't always a pretty sight. What Shelley wanted, she got, no matter how many broken bodies were left behind in the process.

The thought made her uneasy. It wasn't thatshe suspected her friend of having anything to do with the murder of the cleaning lady. Shelley could no more kill someone than
she
could. But still. . her mind kept involuntarily coming back to her, and she kept shaking off her suspicions as fast as they formed.

“There. All taken care of," Shelley announced. "Where next?" Jane asked as they returned at breakneck pace to the van.

“The feed store, for birdseed."

“Feed store? You've got to be kidding? Are there such things around here?" Someone had parked so close to the minivan that Jane could hardly open the door and squeeze in.

“Not on every corner, but I found one. It's not far."

“Why don't you just buy birdseed at the grocery store?"

“That junk? That's for people who don't know birds. I have a special combination I mix myself. Are you in? Good. Now, you were saying about VanDyne?…" She pulled into traffic.

Jane told her about the conversation she'd had with him, but finished by saying, "Forget about him for a minute. I want to tell you why somebody wanted to kill Edith." The idea was only partially developed in her own mind, but she needed to hear herself say it before she'd know whether it had any merit. "Remember the talk we had on the phone about my desk drawer being meddled with? Well, I think that's the other part of the story. I think Edith had gone snooping in it. You see, we were trying to figure out who would want to steal anything in it.

What we didn't consider was somebody wanting to steal information.”

They'd reached a dilapidated shopping center in a suburb that looked like it had once been a little outlying town before Chicago oozed out and engulfed it. Shelley circled around a dry cleaner of questionable hygiene and went down an alley. There, looking like a scrap of country town, was a clapboard building that had big bags of fertilizer and grass seed piled in front and a faded sign that said,
FEED.

“
What in the world are you talking about?" Shelley asked, coming to a stop in front of this vision and turning the engine off. "This is all too baroque for me."

“Blackmail."

“Blackmail!You?”

Jane bristled. "I'm certain she was quite disappointed in her efforts to find out anything interesting about me."

“Oh, I didn't mean that. Well, maybe I did.”

Jane smiled. "I guess I might as well just face the fact that I'm boring and be proud of it. A few more encounters with Detective VanDyne ought to do the trick."

“Jane, we're both boring in a conventional sense. All of us are. But blackmail? And how does my missing pearl necklace figure in this theory?"

“Beats me," Jane said. "It might not have anything to do with it. The necklace might have been missing for a while, mightn't it? When were you last sure you had it?"

“The day I stuck it in the drawer a year or soago," Shelley admitted. "Let me think about this while I get the birdseed.”

She hadn't been kidding about her recipe for birdseed. She took in two big, empty, lidded plastic buckets that had once contained a stupendous amount of plaster, and had the clerk fill them with a precise mixture of shelled sunflower seeds ("The cardinals love it."), shelled peanuts ("For chickadees."), safflower seeds ("A favorite with the titmice.") and cracked corn ("Sparrows have to eat something.").

While Shelley supervised the mixing, Jane roamed around the store. It was like being in a different world, a rather old world. Or at least an unfamiliar one to a woman who had lived nearly everywhere on earth but the American farm belt. Besides the barrels of every seed known to the mind of man or bird, there were barrels of rabbit food — which looked surprisingly like rabbit droppings — and pressed-meal dog bones big enough for a woolly-mammothsized dog. There were all sorts of cages and water troughs and animal food dispensers, and a huge supply of old-fashioned mousetraps. There were even salt licks for deer. In another section, she found canning equipment, heavy ceramic bowls, and blue-speckled pots and pans and giant coffee pots, like cowboys probably had on the trail.

On the last aisle there were gardening supplies. This evidence of suburbia was probably what kept the delightfully old-fashioned store in business. Here, the floor had been cleared, and a big sign said that in a short time this section would be full of the best quality Dutch bulbs for fall planting. Next to the sign, a wire rack contained a tidy stack of bulb catalogues. Jane picked one up and was paying for it when Shelley's long-suffering clerk went staggering out the door under the substantial weight of her purchases.

“We can always tell autumn is just around the corner when you come in, Miz Nowack," he was saying as Jane got in the minivan. "You're always the first to stock up."

“Everybody feeds the birds in the winter, and if I start earlier I get all the good ones," Shelley replied with a laugh as she started the van.

She shifted conversational gears as easily as the van's gears. They'd hardly cleared the driveway of the feed store when she said, "In some ways it makes sense, Jane. If you leave the pearls out of it. One thing it would explain is the difference in the way people feel about Edith. You know — some people who are fanatically clean swear by her, and others who are slobs didn't think she did a good job."

“I don't quite—"

“See, if you're a terrific housekeeper and you're being blackmailed by her, it would be dangerous to bad-mouth her, so you'd claim she was good even if you knew she was awful."

“And you'd have to keep her on because, if you fired her, she'd tell people. No. That's backwards. If she's getting money from you for blackmail, she doesn't need to work for you anymore, but if you fire her, how can you go around saying how good she is? My brain is turning to mush."

“Hmmm," Shelley mused. "You've got apoint. There are two ways of looking at this. Who's being blackmailed? The ones who keep her or the ones who fire her? Either way, if you keep her or not, you'd be under orders from her not to criticize, because the only way she has of getting a supply of new victims is to keep having new homes opened to her. Good God, Jane! What's happening to us? Here we are, inventing this whole ugly little scenario with details and finishing touches just on the strength of your thinking maybe someone got into your desk."

“But you believe it, don't you?"

“Yes, I'm afraid I do. At least it's one way of accounting for what happened, and so far nothing else has made the least bit of sense.”

They were quiet as Shelley negotiated an entrance ramp onto the highway. Finally, as they neared their street, Shelley said, "You know what this all means, if we accept it?"

“What?"

“That poor old Ramona Thurgood was killed by a woman, and by a woman we know.”

“Shelley! What a thing to say!"

“Think about it. We know everybody Edith works for. Monday she does Joyce Greenway. Tuesday is Mary Ellen Revere, and Wednesday is Robbie Jones — or maybe it's the other way around. Then Thursday is me, and Friday is you."

“Not anymore. Besides, she's worked for lots of other people. You said yourself it could be that she doesn't go on working for the people she's blackmailing."

“Still, she's a sort of fixture in the neighborhood. Look how many people we know who have had her clean for them at one time or another. Besides, if it had been somebody we don't know who killed here, then how would they have found out she would be at my house on Thursday? I don't think the Happy Helper people give out that kind of information. In fact, I know they don't. I had a woman from there once when our usual lady was on vacation a year or so ago, and she left her watch by the sink. When she didn't call me to say she'd left it by the next day, I phoned the company to find out if I could just drop it off to her if she was in the neighborhood. The company sent a guy out in a truck to pick it up instead of telling me where to find her."

“I still think there must have been some other way. Suppose she mentioned working for you to some other customer? Some stranger."

“And just incidentally told them which day she worked for me, what my address is — remember, we're not listed in the phone book — and which week she was supposed to be in my house alone? If you can buy that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to tell you about."

“Oh," Jane said and subsided into silence until they pulled into Shelley's driveway. "You're saying, then, that if we accept this theory, one of our friends is not only being blackmailed, but is a murderer besides—"

“Friends, or acquaintances. I think the distinction may be important to us someday."

“And it's only somebody who knew she'd be there alone because you were going out to the airport for most of the day."

“Right."

"So who did you tell?"

“Everybody who was supposed to come to the meeting that night."

“Oh, Shelley, those people are all
really
friends of ours!"

“Afraid so. Jane, next time I go for birdseed, you'll understand why I don't invite you along for conversation," Shelley said grimly.

Thirteen

shelley
dropped off the birdseed and
Jane
and went off to do the rest of her errands. Jane, shaken badly by the result of her own chain of reasoning, sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

She really ought to be doing something worthwhile. Ironing, laundry, or something, but she felt oddly drained. Thinking she could take her mind off murder, she flipped on the little black-and-white TV on the kitchen counter.

A group of extremely aggressive-looking women were presenting their theory that the society of the United States was rotten to the core. Their proof was that as members of a Communist-lesbian support group, they'd been denied the right to adopt children. Phil Donahue was weaving in and around the audience, attempting to make those who expressed even the mildest disagreement look like right-wing fanatics who might have been out burning crosses that very week.

Jane flipped the TV off, brooding. It was amazing what some people were eager to tell about themselves, eager to the point of wantingto share it with a national audience. She rather suspected that if she herself were a lesbian, a Communist,
or
someone who'd been passed over as unfit to be an adoptive parent, she'd probably want to keep the whole thing as quiet as possible. To be all three and want to tell the world about it amazed her.

Which brought her right back to the subject she was trying to avoid — Ramona Thurgood's murder. If she and Shelley were right in their reasoning, then someone they knew had a deep, dark secret. Not a secret to share with the public, but something so awful that she was willing to actually kill another human being to keep it quiet.

That one mental statement was crammed with considerations with which Jane was hardly prepared to cope. The fact that a woman could commit murder, for starters. Even though the news was filled with reports of women who killed, Jane could never quite bring herself to believe it. Murder was, to her, a strictly male activity. Being a mother, she was convinced that any mother could and would do anything to protect her children, but not necessarily herself. Very rarely herself. Stretching her imagination, she could just barely conceive of a few women she'd known
commissioning a
murder. Wanting it done so badly they'd have it done secondhand. That, of course, raised the question of how one found somebody to commit murder for you, but that didn't seem to be the point here.

Besides, what secret could be so dark and dangerous and compelling? After all, these were people she
knew.
Of course, everybody had something they didn't want others to know about — well, everybody except the people who wanted to be on Phil Donahue's show. Even though Jane's life abroad had prepared her for many things, she wasn't at all prepared to picture her neighbors, who belonged to the PTA, as people capable of having done something so awful that they might turn to murder.